#boolean

Another one for Sorineth TCG! This one's pretty special... but if you want to see how special, go grab a box of Set 1 when it releases!

Oh. My. Days.

Stardew. Valley.

Stardew Valley.

Stardew Valley.

Gng. I completely understand you want non binary options in this game. I completely understand you feel uncomfortable when you are called the wrong thing. I get it. I have told people SO many times that I do not label myself with any sexuality. How many times have I told people I don’t have a sexuality. And people just go ‘oh yeah she’s aroace,’ like NO I do NOT HAVE a sexuality. It pmo so bad so I completely get why you feel uncomfortable when being called the wrong pronouns.

HOWEVER

You guys are not thinking about Stardew Valley as a game. Think for 5 seconds about the game. About how things are different for which gender your are, about how the story changes for when you are a different sex. That is all in the game’s code. Concerned Ape did that for us to give us a layered experience. So the game feels different if you play it multiple different times as a different gender. Because CA cares about his game you can tell when he’s speaking about it, he wanted to add so many details.

Currently the game runs on Boolean. This information can easily be googled if you don’t believe me. Boolean works on a true/false system. So ‘if maleFarmer == true’ which basically means if the farmer is male, or if it was false it would be if the farmer is female. During events or instances where something is decided by gender (for example if you adopt or give birth to a child) the game would run this code and give the option that relates to that gender. Clearly non binary would fit into neither of these two option.

Again, Boolean is true/false. There are ONLY TWO OPTIONS. He cannot add a third one if he remains with that code. Which means changing the code for THE ENTIRE GAME WHEN THERE IS A GENDER RELATED THING. I don’t think people realize just HOW time consuming that can be. Especially for someone literally making a whole game right now on his own.

And before people argue ‘if mods can do it, then by definition the game should be able to do it,’ that’s just completely wrong. That’s not how modding works. I know a tiny bit about modding but my sister has modded games including mods for Stardew valley. She says most of the time, you can just change labels instead of changing the whole code. This basically means the binary options are still happening, but the labels are just changed. Whole boxes of dialogue is just changed.

Yes-this works for some people. No-this is not an actual fix.

And again, before you say ‘why doesn’t CA just do that?’. CA needs to code his game properly otherwise there will be issues with people playing the game-especially on console. CA can’t essentially ‘cheat code’ it.

CA cannot physically change it unless he goes through his whole game to change the pronoun options. The reason games like Tomadachi Life and Fields of Mysteria can have pronoun options is because they don’t have so many events that are decided by pronouns. They can add more pronouns whilst CA can’t.

I’m not saying CA is completely free of blame. Maybe he should have thought of this earlier before coding the entire thing. And there is absolutely no excuse for the appalling lack of diverse culture and races. Yes—he is only one person. No—he is not a perfect person.

But seriously, you need to realize that the amount of people who signed that petition was really not that high. He is making an entirely new game on his own right now. Pronouns is not the top of his priority list.

I hope this was at least a little bit helpful at helping to understand why it would take so much time and effort to do this. I hope you understand it’s really not as easy as ‘just add some more pronouns—mods can do it,’. I mean, really think about how many times something is different for male/female.

Anyways I googled what code the games gender options are which is where I found it was Boolean. Feel free to look that up if my explanation sucked. All information about Boolean came out of my own brain-I’m a computer science student so I’ve spent a small amount of time studying Boolean, however quite a while ago. It was acc some great revision but if you want to get a better explanation, just ask google.

The humble boolean:

MUAHAHAHAHAHAAHAAHAHAAHAHAAHAHAHAHA FUCK YOU BOOLEANS I GOT IT RIGHT HAHAHAHAhahahaahah